00:00:00 Speaker 1: Oh hey, everybody. Episode eighty four of T A C. I just messed up the intro twice. At first I said that this was the Mediator podcast, and then I said, oh hey, dude, hey man, I'm getting progressively better and worse at this the same time. I feel anyway, this episode eighty four, it's a good one. It's about snakes. Most of it's about snakes. At least. We had Harry W. Green, who is a herpetologist, the first herpetologist ever on the show, and he will not be the last. He is an interesting gentleman. He's a professor and many other things which you'll hear about in the interviews. Stick around to learn about snakes and also his book, which is one of the better books I've ever read. Hopefully you check that out and pick it up. And I didn't. I went on a little bit of a rant, which will hear soon, a little bit of a rant. So there's a rant about drawing the line. And then we had, of course another Nozira sharp moment that's pretty damn good. But before we get to that, I want to talk to you guys about Meat Eater season eight. Meat Eater season eight is now on Netflix, you guys know about Netflix. I remember when Netflix was just where you had to like get a CD out of it. It mailed you a CD or DVD is probably what that was. They mail your DVD and then you had to mail it backtone or whatever. That was not so long ago. But now it's a juggernaut. It's the Juggernaut platform that brings you many, many, many good content projects. Paramount among them is meat. Each season eight, it's an eight episode season includes lots of really cool things that are near and dear to my heart. Uh Mexico. CU's dear Maryland, seek a deer Maryland. And of course this is very near and dear my heart because that's my home territory. So I'm glad we went there. But there you can go right now to Netflix and binge to your heart's desire with Steve Ronella, Ryan Callahan. You honest to tell us the whole crew out there doing fun stuff and eating. So Netflix Mediator season eight, check it out. Proud of the team for doing awesome work on this one. So go binge or don't, whatever you want to do. It's free country now. If you go to first light dot com as we speak, you're gonna learn about the Brookstown Sweater. We talked about the Brookstown sweater here before. Brooks Down sweater is my favorite, probably my favorite piece of cold weather gear from first light the fact I have one and my wife, who's pregnant, wears it all the time. She thinks this looks fashionable. Um, it's It's only about ten point nine ounces, it's ultra light, it's highly packable, perfect installations. Got a hundred grams of DWR treated eight hundred PHIL three thirty seven point five downtech. It's advanced active installation. I actually wore it on an Elk hunt where it was warm in the morning and a snowstorm blew in. I wore it in the hike in and I wore for sitting in glassing. Uh for elk. So I mean it is a it's a durable piece. It's a lot of duality. You can wear it pretty much anytime you need insulation. So go check out the Brookstown sweater first. Like dot com. Okay, here's episode eighty four coming at you. Let's go. I guess I grew up on an older road, a pedal to the medals. I always did what I've told until I found out that my brand new closed a game second hand from the rich kids next door. And I grew up fast. I guess I grew up. I mean, there are a thousand things inside of my head I wish I ain't seen, and now I just wanted to a real bad dream or being and like I'm coming a part of the seams. But thank you, Jack Daniel. No, Hey, everybody, welcome to episode eighty four. I'm been O'Brien. Say Hi, Phil, Hello Phil. You're just mentioning that you're going through a bit of a uh, attitude adjustment here recently. Yeah, well, I feel like I have to stick up for myself, uh to you and also the people, the THHD listeners who are write again with frankly just rude names for a mustache they haven't even seen yet. They haven't even it's looking better. It's looking better, Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's here. He's kind of like a Henry Beauregard must The main problem is the color. Yes, not it's best for men or whatever. Hair. Jael just one of those coman coloring dye. Next thing, you know, you're Phil from the TV Doctor. Phil. Yeah, I'm I'm looking more. I'm more of a mustache man than Ryan Callahan. Yep, I will define the mustache for this company and the generation. The generation. Yeah, that's what I strive for. So anyway, a lot of you guys have wrote in with like name Phil's mustache and most of them meat, and so we're fighting back. I'm on Phil side. It's the first time for everything. I guess. I'm on Phil side. Stop saying offensive names about his mustache, even though a lot of them are pretty funny. Sure, I guess anyway, mustache, what's what's a November? Yeah, that's coming up soon. So are you gonna keep it for that? No? I think November one. It's it's gone. All right, We'll get your touching it and then pulling at it. It's a problem. We'll get your mustache names in now because we're not having this anymore. Make them nice, polite mustache names. Get bastards, all right. We got a lot, we got some things to address here. But today's guests is Harry W. Green Uh, a wonderful man, a professor for a very long time, and a herpetologist. Phil, you know what herpetologist is vaguely because I've been mixing the podcast, but I would not be able to define for you right now, let's define herpetologist someone who specialized in the study of reptiles and amphibians but slithers around. Herpetologist is into it. Um. But Harry, who we had a great conversation. We're gonna keep this uh intro segments short because I want to get pretty much directly to the conversation with Harry, because I think it's one of the best his books, his particularly his his book you'll hear about in the interview is is one of the best I've ever read. I would say, I mean, it's just as great as he calls an eccentric meditation on the outdoors. Um, and it's great. So you hear about that coming up. But um, we've got a couple of things to cover off on from previous podcasts and I we're gonna we'll get to it. But snakes, fill Are you afraid of snakes? Phil? Uh? No, not not particularly unless they're kind of exotic looking and move quickly. Do you have any stories about snakes? We had any close run ins or do you have? You been fairly No, nothing dangerous. No, I've never come across a rattlesnake in the wild but I used to cash little garter snakes in my backyard, and um, you know, they did the whole thing at school. He had a like a wildlife assembly and you have to hold the boat constrict and I was into that. So no, I don't have like a physical horror like horrific reaction. Well I don't either. I'm not into them. I don't want them to be crawling around wherever I am, but I don't hear them at all. Yeah, but it turns out pheel As you know that fear snakes is one of the most common phobias in all of humanity. I have that tracks that makes sense. And you're gonna hear from Harry Green why he thinks that's true. Well, a lot of studies will we'll back this up, and it's just because and again Harry goes into this in some detail, but it's because we've been around them for so long. Um, they were on the savannahs of Africa when we were becoming if you believe in all of this, becoming lower hominids and turning into humans that we are today. And so there's just a lot of history with snakes. So it's interesting to learn about him, say and they're just interesting animals. They slither not like many other beings that you'll run into, So they're just an interesting, interesting creature. I think we're all interested in them. There's some people are Annie Razor, who has been on this podcast before talking about Game of Thrones, wouldn't even be in the podcast room, wouldn't even be in the office if we had a snake in here. No, she was. I honestly couldn't believe her reaction when we just started talking about snakes. She was like, Nope, I'm not I don't want to hear the words snake. Stop it. I don't want to think about snakes. She was like, And honestly, if you're thinking about bringing a snake into this office, you should really let people know so they have a chance to not be here. And I think she was talking about herself. So throughout evolutionary history, we have learned to fear snakes, and it has manifested itself in different ways. Annie is an extreme example. I couldn't even get her in the podcast to talk about snakes. So that's that. So we're gonna talk about that with UM with Harry W. Green and just a moment. But we got a bunch of emails. Thanks for everybody's been writing into th hc ats medator dot com with both your not so sharp moments, your names, fulfills mustache, and just your general musing is about the show. There's been lots and lots and lots of good emails. It's hard to keep up. So if I have an emailed you're back, I'm sorry, but I will get to it. UM. I'm just happy to see everybody with feelings one way or the other about the show. UM. I got one from Brandon Hill that I wanted to read. Um, that's really really interesting. I won't read the whole thing, but he basically just says you've mentioned many times about finding common ground and striving to not upset each other. I think the one thing you have in address is where we draw the line. I get it. There's no reason to intentionally rub our grip and grin picks and the faces of anton hunters and vegans. We shouldn't go out of our way to be assholes to those that are offended by what we love to do. But what is wrong with being proud of your accomplishments and wanting to share with your family and friends When do we say to our opposition, you know what enough is enough? This is what I do, this is my lifestyle. I'm proud and I don't give a ship about your hurt feelings. You suggested we should always be opening and evaluate and compromise our values. I disagree. There has been. There's become a point we put our foot down and you'll know more. Otherwise we will slowly be bullied into the end of that which we hold. So dear, that's pretty well staged, pretty well stated. There's kind of things I think that goes back to the Grip and Grins conversation. It does yesterday last week, I mean, and it goes to last week's from your conversation. It goes to the Bearer conversation with Barry Gilbert. It goes all the way back to the going to uh Berkeley and talking to vegans and animal rights activists. There's a couple of things that that Brandon says that just aren't I think if you would go back and listen to my comments that just I think aren't um they don't track with my views. I don't there and I've said this many many times. There's some things that I will not I will not bend on. There are some things I believe to be true, and I'm not gonna bend on doing them, talking about them, promoting them, whatever they might be. Um, certainly gun rights is one of those things. I believe in the Second Amendment. But it's not that I wouldn't have a conversation somebody that doesn't believe in the Second a moment, and I'm not going to tell them within that conversation. Hey, be quiet. I don't agree with you. And so I think Brandon's Brandon. Thanks for writing in Brandon, and and I appreciate it. But I think what you're saying there is just I just think it's wrong. I don't agree. And the reason I don't agree is within the conversation. I can have strongly held beliefs, but if I'm going to approach a conversation by saying like enough is enough, I don't want to talk to you about this, I don't care what you think. Is basically what you're saying about. I don't give a shit about your hurt feelings. Just basically I don't care what you think. This is not the way that I that I go about things. There are some things that I'm not gonna move on. When I talk to Barry Gilbert, I wouldn't be like, you know what, the North American midle of conservation. Yeah, that's fine, it might suck, but like I'll address the reality that it's not perfect. But I'm not gonna budge on the fact that I think it's a prescription for a better wild life and better conservation in this country. And so I don't mistake if you're out there listening, don't mistake me for some kind of push over snowflake. I just don't do that, because that's not the case. Um I am. The willingness to have a conversation in the modern sense does not mean that you're going to fold to every push against your ideologist. It doesn't. But it means you're open to new ideas. And being open to new ideas doesn't mean you have to sacrifice the ones you believe in. And so we can do both things at the same time, and we should do both things at the same time. So that if the question is where do I draw the line, I don't have a line. I'll talk to any want about anything at any time, and there's no line that I have to draw about my beliefs Now, like I said, there's certainly beliefs that I hold that I think that would be almost impossible for somebody to talk me off of, Like hunting is valuable for wild life, for human kind and for all of us. It's gonna be hard to get me off of that one. But I certainly let somebody try. Um. And I'll certainly if someone makes a good point, I'll certainly think about it. And if I feel the need to adjust my ideologies or my beliefs on something, and I will. And so in this common the pushback on liberals to say that, oh uh, you're a snowflake if you bend to what somebody thinks. Yeah. Fine. I think that the outraging machine in this country is a bit off the rails. I think people are trained that they can get what they want through outrage, and we are developing Internet mobs and we're not really understanding how they've come together or what they can do. I think we're babies when it comes to social media in the Internet. Then we're learning. But all of that is to say, I don't have a line. Where do I draw the line? I really care. There's no line, there's no there's no person that could sit in this room that I wouldn't talk to. There just isn't. Um, There's plenty of people that I can think of that I could talk to, and then I know we probably wouldn't come to any agreement, but I'd want to talk to him anyway, because understanding the other side of an issue is as important as your own beliefs, in my opinion, So maybe that's maybe that puts me directly in the cross airs of people that think, um, they should be proud about their beliefs and shout them from the rooftops. If I guess, if you listen to this, you know that I do too. But that doesn't I don't sacrifice. I don't sacrifice anything because of that within a conversation. So that's what I believe. What do you think about all that, philm That was a bit of a rant. If I deserve a ranted, it's been a while ranted in a while. Yeah, So I deserve a rant every once in a while. It's your show. You deserve deserve whatever you want. What do you feel like that you feel like you're learning anything from sitting in here and all these conversations. Yeah, I mean, I'm entrenched into a bunch of stuff that I had never really thought about before working here. So it's been that's why I appreciate you, because you're just like coming from a fresh perspective and a lot of this stuff. Which again that's another point I'll make People with fresh perspectives that aren't in your aren't in your bubble, they're not in your echo chamber, are important. So and people with heartened perspectives are important to have in your life. That that don't believe what you believe. I have lots of friends and family members that we do not believe the same things. We often argue about fairly important things. And my grandfather always said, don't bring sex, religion, or politics to the dinner table. I don't believe in that. I believe we should be able to have those constructive conversations about very important subjects without getting all spun up about them. Anyway, that's that I was gonna give a brief answer to that question, but I give a long answer. So anyway, if you're listening to this and you and you just feel like I need to push back on some of these folks more or that take harder stances on subjects here there, I mean I'm certainly going to be firm and the things I know to be true, but I'm also looking to be proven wrong at some level. I'm looking to test my ideas and make sure they're strong enough to last any battle, to last any debate, to last any argument. Because if my ideas aren't good enough to last in any conversation, then they're not good enough overall. So that's the way I think about it. Hopefully this show reflects that Um and Brandon's Brandon's comments weren't challenging to me, but that it was a challenging question something I thought about after I read it. Um, And so I'm not gonna be bullied by anybody out of my beliefs. But that doesn't mean I'm gonna push them away if they start to bully me. Um. So we'll see. We're going to continue still to get some challenging people in this room talking about crazy stuff and see where it goes. Um, all right, we're gonna move on. I think, Philler, am I gonna keep going. I think we should move on. You get more to say. I thought you laid it all out there. Though I laid it out. Here's another message I got from Jesse. He said, I got a real dilemma. I think you folks had help me with. Here's the deal. I fella at my work died recently, and his memorial services on rifle opener for elk. My freezer is getting pretty low, and I've got plans to be out at first light on opening day to replenish my supply of elk meat. I wasn't particularly close with the guy, but I did help him move a while back and met his family a time or two. Can't decide if I'd be an asshole for not going to the funeral. I'm a student, so I've really only got a few weekends to hunt, and even then my time is limited. What do you think? It's really been weighing on me, and I'm worried about what others, what others around my shop will do if I don't go. Thanks for the great podcast. Blah blah blah. This is a Phil. Yeah, you're asking Dr Phil my opinion first. I'll give mine first. I'll let you off fok on that one. Okay, a guy died, man, thank you, that's my opinion. He's dead, he's the man's got a family. He's got a family. Yeah, I would say it would be that'd be a tough look for you if you did not go to this memorial. I mean, I get it, your hedge and you're like, I only knew him a couple of times, but he's dead, and he was a person yesterday dead, worked with him move. That's close enough, like friends circle wise helping someone move. Phil's never helped me move. No, never helped him. I wouldn't if you. Yeah, I said, hey, Phil, well help me. No, No, but you'd come to my funeral? I bet I think so, yeah, and so yeah, man, I hope the funeral prior already happened by the time you'll hear this, But I hope you went, Jesse, And if you didn't, real guilty right now, Folding. It's one of those things where if you if you have to ask yourself the question, you already know the answer. You just yeah, you just don't want to already know the don't want to hear someone else. We've all had like a long distant aunt that died and you just don't. You go to the funeral, but you don't go for the ant. You go for the people that you know who knew the aunt. So like just go and be happy about it. And if you need to borrow some meat from a friend, you'll probably find a friend. And if that friend dies, goes his funeral, to go to people's funerals, and then during the service you can sneak over to his house and take his meat at Yeah, he doesn't need anymore. Yeah, feels getting feels going dark, spicy, it's getting spicy, it's going full heel on us if you know what that like? Bill his character turn anyway, go to the funeral, Jesse for for goodness sakes, man, I love hunting and I love wild meats. That's all I talk about. But um, if if a co worker died, anyone here, immediate or I would go to the funeral pretty much every time, even if it wasn't somebody that I was super close with. So you know, I'll be there for you, Phil, the worst happen, the worst happen, they'll be there. You probably be standing, you know, on the sidelines, thinking about all the hunting you could of course, dude, I might be watching I might be watching hunting videos on my phone at your funeral, yes, Or I might be looking at onyx maps trying to figure out by the best, the quicker route in because I don't have as much time that that would make it even more special, knowing how badly you didn't want to be there but you were. Anyway, I might go hunting in the morning, because people do. People have funerals in the morning. It's usually I'd say around lunch. It's lunch, So I might find a spot and I might go hunting in the morning. And then if I kill an Elk, I wouldn't come. Wait, no, I would still come. You just yelled at the guy. If I killed Elk, I would market. I would market and it was away point. And then quickly go to the funeral and wash the blood. I probably watched the blood off. Quickly go to the funeral and then come back. Yeah, I think how bad you would feel if you went out and you didn't get anything and you missed this guy's funeral for enough. What if what if you missed a giant bull like a hundred of yards and then that was the guy looking down at You're saying karma, Yeah, I should have went to my funeral. Now you're feeling poorly on many multiple levels. Anyway, go to the service. Go to the service, please, Lord, go to the service. Man's gotta draw a line. Phil. You know what I'm saying now, this is where I draw the line. Man's gotta draw the line. All right, Well, we're gonna get into uh something you you all really love. We got a lot of a lot a lot, a lot a lot not so sharp moments, Phil, A lot of them, um, hundreds of them in fact. So it's been hard for me to sift through them. But they've all been very entertaining, and we um we have a bit of an issue to discuss around last week's not so sharp moment presented by work sharp. There's a song. Are you aware of this, Phil? A song by fella named cord Lund called My Truck Got Stuck. Nope, I was not aware. It is basically, if you listen to it. Several people sent this to me. It is if you listen to it, it is basically the story that we read last week. So what are you implying here? I'm not implying anything. Many people implied it to me that we got duped. Oh okay, well here's see. I would I would tend to kind of be like my my, my eyebrows would be raised. But I did go to Elliott's Instagram, and I went all the way back and he did. I mean, he didn't post any photographic evidence of the trucks, but there is evidence of this, like if this event actually happening, um on his Instagram. He talked about it before, like months before he ever rode into th HC. So I don't think I don't I don't think he would make up the story. I trust Elliott. I'm not. I defended Elliott and all the correspondent stuff. Okay, Good said, Elliott is a stand up in divid here's the song. It's a nice tune. I like it so far. Brown Prairie that had been for so long was very uney, very muny. Maybe it just inspired him in his pros. Sure, yes, um, anyway, we're on to you Elliott. Yeah. Well he's in good company. Then he's not alone. Other people have had not so sharp moments. Yeah, that's true. No, I think I think it's just a common thing that happens to you in Canada. Did trucks get stuck? All the trucks get stuck in Canada? Yeah, if you if you were to fly over in a helicopter and airplane, it's just a graveyard of trucks. Trucks everywhere, everywhere, there's ones. There's one front endloader just going around endlessly. The same guy, same thing, doing it for hundreds of years. So anyway, I'm on the side of Elliot here. I don't think he embellished that at all. I think it was completely true because he stopped in the middle of the story to say it's true. It's very true. But I know this sounds crazy, but it's true. But it's true. All right, Well, hit the jingle fill. We're up for the next not so sharp moment. Work sharp, not so sharp moment, so you don't have Okay, this one some Cody Gardner says, a long time THHD listener cool appreciated Cody. He's got a not so sharp moment. We will begin. When I was a child, I saw a movie where a kid owned a raccoon as a pet. M See where this one's going, PHILM this Poconhontas. I don't know. He doesn't mention the movie. Okay, I can't think of any other movie that's a good that's a good pool, nice pool. I don't even think of any of those types of movies. This inspired a dream of owning my own raccoon. How do you say raccoon? You say raccoon or raccoon. I say raccoon. Hit me too, I was trying to sauce it up there, and I said raccoon, raccoon. One day I asked a neighboring farmer for permission to go snag car up in an irrigation pond. I received permission to fish, but it came with a warning that at said pond there was a defensive raccoon that may have babies, and a stack of pipe next to the pond. This I like. I like this already, and it's like a dragon tower. This this was my chance to fulfill my dream. I proceeded to investigate the suspect pipe. To my delight, saw staring back from one of the pipes a small set of eyes. I reeled my hook into the end of the pipe and thrust my pole Jesus and I gave it a twirl, and I and eagerly pulled my new best friend's tail first to the end of the pipe. At this moment, I was given the opportunity to make a better decision, but failed in the most epic fashion. The tail didn't look like I was expecting, so I decided to straddle the pipe, grab the tail with both hands, and lean over for closer inspection. The last thing I remember, as I focused into the darkness, straining my eyes and mouth a gape is the is the sight that wrenched dirty little cheerio puckered and eyes that were poised at fire. What happened next still inspires nightmares. I was hit with a direct shot in the open mouth, up the nose, and in both eyes with the most vile substance in all of nature, skunk spray. See there's a twist. Even that's good stuff. I gased in shock, filling both lungs to capacity with a half atomized, blasting steam of pure liquid terror, which sent me immediately wretching to the ground, writhing in pain and feeling as though I had been galls in both eyes with a glowing red fire poker. I could not see at all, and when was unable to open my eyes and take a full breath, profuse vomiting quickly overtook me, and I truly feared for my life as I lay flailing in a mate of goat heads, wondering as a terrified child with little life experience, which failed attempt at breathing would be my last. A friend I had taken to fish with me grabbed me by my ankle and drugged me. Kicking and screaming between heaves through the mess of gold heads, my own body explosions went into the pond. He then proceeded what he referred to as help, but I would call it more like waterboarding. At this point, I was consistently sucking pond water with every plunge, and spewing my insides out every time I was jerked back to the surface by the fistful of hair he so persistently held. He probably would have preferred a dragon. I was again in legitimate fear of the end. I made it home eventually, and in a fitting end of the story. As I entered my home, still shaken by the near death experience, the first words of a compassion I heard from my father was a stern command to get out. I lived outside for a week until theycame fit to be in the presence of others. But the shame, embarrassment, chilling memory of this story still linger to this day. Yes, that was that was a good one. Again, like the jingle Phil not so sharp poem. So you don't have thanks work sharp We're gonna Cody, We're gonna send you. We should send you like a couple of cans of tomato sauce or something. Yeah, can of a breeze for breeze, but we're going to send you a work sharp field sharpener instead. Hopefully that makes it this, this gruesome childhood memory all the better. Thanks for writing in, everybody. Continue to write in at th HC at the media dot com. Try to top Cody story. Hopefully there's not a song about skunk spray somewhere that I don't know about. I'm assuming there isn't. We're watching you, Cody, but we're watching you people. Plagiarism is not good. You got a drawline somewhere now. Mr Harry W. Green, color State University, enjoy I guess I grew up on all the road. Harry, how's it going. Nice to meet you too, Thanks for having me here at I'm getting some days avou going back to college. A little late to our meeting, so I felt like I was late to class across campus I did. Yeah, I didn't know where I was. Much like college. I was lost, and then I had to find the building, So it really felt like I was back back to my collegian days. Um. So we're here at Colorado State University, and um, I always like to have guests like describe their surroundings, but you know, we're in your office. Um, but kind of just described how you came to be at Colorado State because it's a that's a long story, but the shorter version after your retirement. Right. So I've been retired about two and a half years. I'm married to another biologist. She mainly studies frogs and the fungi they're killing frogs. I mainly study snakes. She's not retired yet and she has some close collaborators here at Colorado State. So when she got our sabbatical leave, that's where we decided to come. Yeah, so you were previously we were talking to your previously uh, East coast dweller as I was and new to the West. Yeah, although I grew up mostly in Texas and then I worked in Berkeley for twenty years, So I really think of myself as a Westerner, and uh, I think of Texas as my home. Really, you just have to have a good job, and she has a good job in upstate New York. So, so you're telling me about an elk hunt you got coming up to. Yeah, we're being guided. We're gonna be taken up into the high country in northwestern Colorado this Friday for about we don't know, probably five to seven days. That's beautiful. Yeah, friends, family, your wife's coming along. You told me she's as much a hunter as I am. So yeah, that's awesome. Um, I guess we should should let people know. It struck me that I hadn't heard I hadn't often heard the term her patologist before reading some of your books and looking at some of your works. So can you explain explain what her patologist is her patologists as a person who studies amphibians and reptiles. That's that's the shortest possible answer. So there are lots of things about the biology of amphippies and reptiles. One might study how they eat, how they how they reproduce, where they're found, whether the threats to their persisted and sin in human dominated landscapes. Those are all parts of herpetology, and most herpetologists also have some more general specially so like I'm an ecologist and revolutionary biologist, I mostly study behavior. Got and you've done some interesting studies of of reptile behavior, specifically snakes that I want to talk about. But I was reading your book Tracks and Shadows Field Biology is art and it is Uh, it's striking, thank you it is. It's beautifully written. It. Um. I will say I'm like three chords of the way through it, but from the very first chapter I was thank you so much. Yes, you goat. I mean, I feel like when you're reading something like that. I read a lot of like how to Loopold and some of your what you called eccentric meditations on the kind of the natural world reminded me of of Liopold or somebody kind of with that kind of profundity, with with your experience. Um, and so we should touch on that. But you start starting that book and the opening paragraphs talking about when you first became interested in the natural world as a kid wanted like a ranch in Texas, And there's some lines in there you talk about kind of being just intrigued and asking questions and give people an idea of that time in your life, like when you're asking why does that where are the ears on that turtle? Where? Those types of things. Yeah, well it's actually a farm. My mom grew up in uh fairly extreme poverty in East Texas, outside a tiny town about two hours drive east of Dallas. Her father was a World War One veteran. They had six acres that that Lola, his new teenage bride, had been given by her parents, and they had a They had a plow horse, a jersey cow for milk, a flock of chickens. They raised one pig a year. There's no no electricity, no running water, raise one pig a year, which you could only butcher in the winter because there was no refrigeration, so they had to wait for a really cold day. And and my little brother and I by then, my mom had had moved off married my dad, who was an Air Force officer, so we traveled a lot, but we always came back to grandpa's farm whenever we could. And so my little brother and I, as kids, didn't didn't didn't detect the poverty aspects of it, you know. We we just detected that they lived close to the earth, and we watched what that meant. We watched. We knew where butter came from because my grandmother sat in the kitchen with a churn and a bag of of milk a cream, you know, banging that poll up and down in that little ceramic churn, making butter. And we we knew that poultry died for us to eat them for dinner, because we watched my grandmother butcher the chickens. And one year we watched him butcher a pig. And we knew where milk came from because Grandpa tried to teach us how to milk the cow. So we I grew up with that, And from my earliest memories, I was always curious, you know. And and I mentioned in the book, you know, once finding a box turtle and asking my mom where it's ears, you know, uh, looking at a pig being butchered, and already knowing what an intestine was, and seeing that's an intestine, you know. So so I grew up with interest in natural history and in kinds of animals. My my first taxonomic works were about, you know, how to tell jerseys from Holstein's, from from angus and so forth. You know. Yeah, I mean, it just feels when I was reading that, it is it feels like there's certain kinds of upbrings that foster staff feeling right, that fostered that closeness, like you're saying, to the closest to the dirt, to the natural world. Uh, you'd know, I would have. I would guess from reading your book that that's kind of what led you down the path that you're on, that you've been on for the last five six decades. Is there any Do you have any other moments or stories you can tell people that kind of illustrate how you became to be so, I mean, you spent your life traveling the world looking for crazy reptiles and predators and things like that. You have amazing stories of of pulling pythons by the tail and jaguars and co streak and things like that. Then that I found interesting. All of that came from somewhere. Yeah, And and to some extent I don't even know the answer. I mean, it was a sort of love at first sight thing. My parents weren't what would be called naturalists today. In fact, at this point in my life, I'm really reflecting back on the fact that my mother wanted to escape that poverty which I idolized as a little boy. I once asked my mother, Mom, why didn't you marry somebody like Grandpa so we could live on a farm. And you know, my mother, I only late in her life sort of realized how desperately she worked to get out of that scene. So here, here, I was idolizing something that you know, it wasn't idolizeable to her, but it it did put me around animals that it got me to watching animals, and I loved it from the start. And I'll say this from my parents. Their reaction was to buy me books. So I had my first reptile book when I was seven years old, and so there it was. You know, what I didn't have was any any inkling. There was a career until I was thirteen years old. My father was stationed for one year near Norman, Oklahoma, and he was taking classes at the University of Oklahoma. He came home one night he said, son, I met this I met this professor of zoology and he studies lizards and he wants to talk to you. So the next day I wrote my little three speed at that time, bicycle Down. I met this guy, Charles Carpenter, and I came home that night and I said, boy, I'm going to be a university professor. They get to keep lizards. Because because when I walked in his office. You know, the thing that impressed me was he had these live lizard. He had a live possum living in a cage gender his desk, and I thought, what could be better than living the tream? You got your Yeah, that's right, and he got paid, you know, And so that that was what showed me there was a career path for me, and that there's other transformative part in your life. We'll hustle through this so we can get to all, like we got a lot to cover. Um another point in life where you talk about being an ambulance driver and and being like an assistant mortician, all of these. I will say that all of these reflections that you make in your book kind of all lead to somewhere that kind of the year hypothesis about the natural world and conservation things like that. So I think, just so folks listening, but we get there. I'm kind of excited to get there. So we're gonna work through this. But you talk about how seeing you know, crying infants, like how seeing people die changed you at that early age, like it impacts you still today. You kind of describe that time in your life for folks, Yeah, it happened accidentally. I was such a nerd in high school. I published three signs papers before I graduated from high school, but I didn't hadn't had a date. And then I went off to college and I was like, whoa, there's a whole new world out here, you know, And so I that's why at the end of my junior year in college I had accumulatude one point eight nine g p A. That's a D plus average for three years of college. Because I was having a really good time and my father wasn't giving me a big enough allowance to have as good a time as I wanted to have. So I found out there was this job at the Locals tiny town funeral home and it paid sixty dollars a month, plus you got your room free. So I'd had a boy scout first aid class. I went down. Guy asked me if I had if I had a black tie in a white shirt, and I said yeah, and he goes, be back here at one o'clock. You're hired. And the next thing I knew, I was loading a body off out of a hospital bid onto onto a gurney. And for the long story short, for the next three years or so, first in this tiny Texas town and then in Fort Worth for a big ambulance company. I was an ambulance driver and ambulance met it before they were called E M T s. And this resulted in many, many, many encounters with violence and with illness, with tragic deaths, uh, all of which I sort of almost always took in stride, because I was brought up to just take things in stride. You know. There were there were a couple of events, and it's that that got me, but but mostly I just took it and stride. And when I look back on it now decades later, I think two things that did for me was impressed me with how how precious life is and how permanent death is. And the other thing was that this is in the late sixties. We we couldn't do much in the ambulance. I was later in army medic, and I could do a lot more things as a trained army medic that I could do as a civilian ambulance driver. So I'm afraid we probably made mistakes. Sometimes at the very least, we probably failed to do things that might have saved a few people. And that's haunting. But as a conservation by all just today. I often think about that because I think the dilemma facing conservation biologists and people in general in terms of saving some some section of biodiversity, it's kind of like that we don't know everything we'd like to know, and so the easy way out would be to take no risks because then you won't get criticized. I mean, I think our our our descendants may criticize us, why did why did you let elephants go extinct on a global basis on your watch? So we might have great grandchildren who will look back and wonder why that. Yeah, they all wonder why you in terms of because we're both conservationists at some level. I know we are, so they might look back then, but right now not taking risk because it's sort of the easy way out. Your your peers won't jump on you because you proposed a kind of a crazy thing like place to scene rewilding in the possibility of putting surrogate mammoths back in North America, you know, And I often think that that that. I think that the lemma for conservationist is sort of like the dilemma for an ambulance medic is you know you don't have you're not in in the r You don't have everything you wish you had. You don't know how to do certain procedures, you don't actually know what's going on. You know. I once picked up a guy and the only wound was a blood us caliber hole in his chest, who was sitting on accouch talking to me while his wife sat next to him. And he said, well, and the cops were interviewing him, and he said, well, the wife and I here were arguing and she accidentally shot me. And so I put him on the gurney and I emphasized there's no blood, it's a twenty two caliber slightly bluish hole, is just blue skin. And the guy dies as we unload him at the hospital. So there might have been things that somebody with more advanced equipment training could have done. I didn't have that, you know, And I think conservation bio is kind of like that, you know. Yeah, when I read that, it struck me like, man, you know, we're all twenty year old aimulist drivers. We are, you are and so, and you have all these different views about that that Ultimately we were talking earlier about values. You know, uh, what if it turns out that in order to save the Channel Island gray fox, which is really cool and it's just an incredible animal. You know. Well, it turns out in vacy bald eagles were we're eating the foxes. Why were they there? Because they were subsidized by the feral pigs on the island, you know. So there's a very complex ecological story. And if your values are such that you think that that little uniquely evolved dwarf Tamish Island gray fox that we're saving, you got to get rid of the eagles and the pigs. And how do you choose right? And with what? With what tools can you make that choice right? And it was very acrimonious. And then what if you screw up? Boy, if you screw up, you're gonna be on the nightly news. You'll get a lot of money morning quarterbacking on on. So, Yeah, for every celebration, like for every subbing, should we save with the gray fox? Look at all the foxes? What like what dirty business did you have to do to get there? Yeah, something like that. So I would say, in a way when I look back on those on that period of my life which is now decades ago, it's the grittiness, the uncertainty, the need to in my view, go ahead and act anyway, do the best you can, say what you can say, say what you can say, do the best you can what you got. I hope that you don't suffer too much for mistakes. Yeah, And I found it in reading your writing that that that's what struck me, is like that at some point in my life, I live long enough and I've done enough, I'll be able to meditate on the natural world in the way that you have, in the way that it's been informed by all the moments in your life, and in this case, moments that didn't really have much to do with the natural world. They didn't seem to anyway, they didn't seem to, right, So like all this stuff being intertwined is is interesting me. You You had a quote in the beginning of your book to um, I'm gonna give people out of beginning of the book stuff, so I'll have to go and get it and read it. Um, A journalist Bayard Taylor. Yeah, this is is a real good one. He liked nature to a princess fallen into the hands of robbers who cut off her fingers for the sake of the jewels. She wears. Isn't that incredible? I'm like, the that's incredible, incredible quote. It is, isn't it? And I heard that, uh at a dinner for University California Press authors. So my my first book was about snakes and it was published by them. And I was at a dinner for authors and this famous historian of California history was given the banquet talk and he read that quote and it just electrified me. I mean, I was like a pencil the napkin, you know, and I wrote it down then later burrowed into I actually found copies of Buyer Taylor's books to buy, and I because I wanted to read it in the original, you know, I think that's incredible, incredible, It's incredible. And when he first read it, it it strikes you as kind of like an environmentalist metaphor, but it's it's I think it's deeper than that. I do too, and and that's that's why I used it early in my book, because there is a threat of violence that runs through my own life, and I think we I think it inevitably runs through life, and I think modern humans, especially in some ultras, go to great links to deny that, to hide from it. That's one response to it. I I'm not putting that down. I mean, I've I've seen some violence i'd like to hide from. Yeah, but I'd like to have not seen. So I sort of get that. But in the end, I think it may not service well in terms of conservation. I would agree. And I think we've in the moderns and the more modern like social media sense they have there's a there's a this is a weird thing to bring in a conversation, but there's a page on Instagram called Nature's Metal, and Nature's Metal is just some of the craziest, most carnal things you'd ever predator, you know, predators, ripping faces off, zebras. It's just like it's an expression that nature is crazy and scary and brutal and death defines it. And that's just just what it is. And I think that is like a spasmatic, you know, response to people whitewashing nature and then you know the like anthromomorphizing animals and like, so we've had this that thing is being recognized within our culture, and we're pushing back on it in certain ways, trying to make sure people are aware that in't you know, in Africa. Photos fars are great, but you're not getting And I live right by Yellowster National Park. That's a wonderful place, but it is not nature and like in the way that that you really need to know it. Yes. And so when I much later in life became a late onset deer hunter, one of the and honestly, uh, should I go ahead and say something about this or did you want to know what you want? When when my friend David offered me the opportunity to teach to teach me to deer hunt. Uh, And I had an old model ninety four Winchester which my students at Berkeley had given me as a present. I'm sure I'm the only Berkeley professor ever to get given an old Winchester. But they knew at a certain nostalgia from my Texas youth, and they actually knew that I specifically wanted a pre sixty four model money for Winchester BEAUTIFU beautiful rifle. And so I got this card one day in my mailbox and it said, uh, happy sabbatical. Uh, this is good for one pre sixty four model ninety four. You find it and we'll pay for it. And so I walked into a Seattle gun shop and and said, I'm looking for an old model linety four. And the guy goes, there's a whole rack up and pick out which one you like this? So I went through him, you know, sticking my thumb to the receiver and trying to get enough light to see the the riflings, and and picked out the one I liked best. It turned out from the serial numbers made nineteen fifty, so I had this old Winchester. I've been wanting to try deer hunting for a long time, but he didn't want to be a bozo about it. I knew that, and also, ironically, because my grandpa taught me firearm safety and marksmanship, I was a boy scout and I was a soldier, had lots of experience, and I had a lot of experience with gunshot wounds too. I knew a lot about firearms relatively, but I'd never had a gun safety course, and I knew that you all, I thought that you had to take one to get a hunting license, so I kept putting it off year after year. Plus I didn't have a mentor, and I felt we needed mentor. So my friend David this U t Austin professor David Hillis who who ranches and hunts. He calls me one September two thousand nine. He goes, green, you've run out of excuses. So what are you talking about, David? And he said, turns out in Texas if you were born in ninety seven, your grandfather, did you know? And I thought, God, that's weird. You know, that's kind of crazy. But okay, and he says, yeah, I get yourself a Karen case and come on down and I'll I'll teach it hunt. So I went down there, and I really didn't know how i'd react. I considered the possibility that I would. I would kill one deer and be disgusted and sell my old rifle. How old are you sixty four year old adult hunter? Will you? Yeah? Yeah, that I had just turned sixty four in September, and this was in December. And so I go out kill my first dear, a few days later kill a second dear with a borrowed scoped flatter shooting rifle, And in fact, I end up feeling like it's maybe the most respectful thing I've ever done as a nature lover is to own up to my omnivory and to participate like that. So that's that's what happened. That's it's worth. It's worth thinking about where you were in your life. You're a tenured you know, academic who and I don't want to generalize academics, but I've talked to a lot of them, the ones that work at Berkeley specifically, and I'm headed to Cornell next month. Um, being a hunter is not probably how how will say, it's not like the prevailing thing to be. Um, it just doesn't see that way to me. I'm sure there's there's pockets of all kinds of things, but it's just not not a thing to be your herpetologists. You travel the world, you've done all these things which will well she'll talk about, and you like, you've seen more of the natural world than than most people of people, and you've like and you've found profundity in killing a deer in Texas Like out to me, is that's amazing, you know, at the at the age of sixty four, and you think that that adds some value to like hunting story because it because it's done that for you. You can talk about that a little bit, like what it because it's been you know, a decade or so then since you've been a hunter, right right, and so um, maybe I'll add a little thing about my wife at this point, because she's also an academic. So and it's true, there's there are certain stereotypes of academics, you know, and uh, and they're widely used by by diverse people. Ken Brower, who's a very well known nature writer, he's David Brower's son. Uh. He makes fun of people who criticize classic notions of wilderness by calling them pale men and tweets. Okay, well, well, I'm writing a book now that directly confronts John Muir and Ed Abbey and sort of that nation of wilderness because i think it's got a serious problem and I'm trying to address that in this book. I've were worn tweet in my life, you know. And I have a picture in the in the manuscript the book of me with a backpack in pre Canyon, Utah, in the slick rap country, and I say, pale skin true, no tweets in sight, you know. So uh, I know where the stereotype of academics comes comes from, because there, in fact, are a lot of academics who seem we could say, a little detached from other aspects of life. As many people do it, but probably not as many as most non academics think. Like there are a number of people in my department that hunt, and there are other people in my department who, although they don't hunt themselves, are totally fine with it and even allow those of us to do on their land and things like that. Yeah, and I'm aware of the prevailing like, oh, the new modern live when I when I walk on college campuses, I'm a little looking around, like for gender pronoun signs and ship what's going on? I have that feeling. I know that's not all of it, and I think it's it's that's a good perspective for you too, and it's probably not fair. It's not fair at all, you know, as would be various other stereotypes in various other cultural context but we we all have we all have those. Just like to address that when I when I was reading some of the stuff that that you had said an NPR and Arkle and NPR just kind of going back and forth with a professor friend of yours. That is, I don't know IFULL say anti hunting, but some animal rights thoughts. Um, it struck me as like your place in life, how you got to where you are and where you are is quite the story, especially as a hunter. Um, your first experiences with you know, when you walk up on a dead deer. You've seen dead things in the wild. You've seen wild things, lots of dead things. Um, what was what was that like? Uh? You know the craziest thing. Uh, I don't want to hear the things that are not really relevant. But I have no religious podcasts, aren't no religious beliefs and anymore. And so I walk up to this dough that I've just shot with my old model ninety four wind sister. Uh. And she it's almost dusk. I've shot. She she bounds out of sight left. She's seventy five yards away or so. And I know I've hit her, you know. And I know I'm supposed to wait thirty or forty five minutes to make sure she doesn't jump up if she's down, But it's getting dark and I and so I do get up, all right, I lever in another round, put on half cock safety and walk looking for and I walked fifty yards in there she is down and she's she's got her head up as if she'd been sleeping or taking a nap. And literally, and of course, as you know, this is probably less than forty five seconds after I mean, in in five seconds, a deer goes a long way, you know, so this is not like this deer has been running for a long time. And so as I walk up to her, she fades and draws back down and I go over and touch a leg and she's dead. You know. I've actually made a good bread basket shot. And three words popped into my head and I opened I don't screw this up and forget them. But one of them was sacred and like where did that come from? Gratitude was another one, and I can't remember the third and man, But to me, the most interesting is one is that I came up with the words sacred and they just it just popped into my mind. You know. It's a transformative experience for me. I felt, I felt extremely affected by the fact that I just killed this animal. And of course then we feel dressed at you know. And and later it went back to the freezer in New York and my family and people we invited for dinner eight that eight that deer and I I've always I had already been on that That was the first time I was on that ranch. I've been on that ranch many, many, many times since then. And I always think about the fact that when I eat meat from the Texas Hill Country, which is my favorite place on Earth, I'm more of a participant and less of a spectator in my favorite place on Earth. Yeah, I think, Um, what is interesting to me lately is the transformation. How satisfying the transformation from a dead animal to like, say, a steak is for me. I recently got people that listen to the podcast will know because I keep talking about it, but I really like it. I got a slicer like a meat commercial, like a Deli meat slicer, and we were talking about the other day, like, why is it satisfy? Why is it so satisfying to me to see this meat coming off the slicer ready to be made into lunch meat. That's an elk that I had killed. Why is that so satisfying? And somebody said, a friend of mine said, um, because you're trans just another transformation. It's like another thing that you've done to take the part of that process, to transform this living thing into something that is so useful to you, and that's why it's so satisfacing, and that's why probably right, absolutely, And so the first time you go through that Transformers process and take it home and have a meal with your family back in New York, I'm sure was a was a big deal. Well, and not like that. I paid more attention to all my food now than I used to, even and including vegetables. I mean, I'm I'm much more once I started deer hunting, I became much more interested in eating locally, Like even since I moved before Colins, I've been picking raspberries here and then I buy peaches that the peaches here unbelievable, like most delicious peaches I've ever eaten in my life. I've been buying at the farmer's market here and for Colins every Saturday. And I'm I get a huge sense of satisfaction, pleasure, and some kind of spiritual uh whatever out of knowing that these weren't you know, uh, packaged covered in nitrates all sorts of stuff. They weren't shipped from Chile. They're there from here, And I get a lot of pleasure in that, and and looking at my food that way, and looking at me eating changed once I became a deer hunter. That's that's what happened to me when I really took on honting is like a part of my lifestyle. Then you start thinking like why am I Why don't have a garden because gardens a very similar activity. It is, so why am I doing this? But not that gardening is way easier. Well, I'm actually starting to think about gardening and I've never had any inclination in that direction before. Well, I get back to kind of your teachings and your time in the field as a herpetologist. But I read a thing one of your students at Cornell wants described you as the mythical her herpetological green giant. Oh my gosh, you remember that. No, I don't remember that. Somebody wrote that about you? Was that right? I don't know what that was about. When you were tired they had to think called green Fest told me about that you're tired from Cornell and they just threw a party. Yeah. So one of my former PhD students, man named Jonathan Lassos, who who at that time was a Harvard professor. There's there's something you could stereotype and probably not the entirely fitting a man in an ascot. Yeah. Yeah, so. Uh but Jonathan who's also one of my dearest friends, he and my wife basically organized a party for me and they invited about a dozen people to speak and uh So it started Friday night with a party at my house where we served wild boar in Venison, and then all day Saturday there were there were talks out at the Laboratory of Ornithology, which is an institution on our campus on Southern Town. And so we invited a dozen people that range from um, my boss at Berkeley who was older than I am, too, a woman I first met when as a high school students she took my biology class and she's now a professor at Michigan State. So we had all the way from youth to almost elderly. We had men and women. They gave talks about what they do sort of to celebrate my retirement. It was it was extremely touching and I'm afraid I was in a bed of a days the whole time. Yeah. Well, I guess in the herpetology world, which I'm not familiar with, like, you had a big impact in your life. I mean, you've written hundreds of papers um, how many field studies and books and things like that. Can you just give people an idea of the breath of your work with I think snakes is probably the thing most people be interested in that you did a lot of work with them, Like I've mostly worked on snakes. So I got a master's and a PhD. And for those graduate degrees you have to do a piece of research. You have to write a master's thesis for master three, and you have to write a doctoral dissertation. And the topics of both of my graduate degrees had to do with snake biology, and so I have especially interested in what and how snakes eat. So for example, I've I've looked in the stomachs of thousands of maybe even in tents of certainly many thousand museum specimens to see what their last meal was, if there is one. So snakes don't snakes into eat big meals and therefore not so frequently. So just just by chance, if people go out and preserve a bunch of snakes and put the museum, only a relatively small fraction will wet food in their stomach because they don't eat so so on an average I probably get about a ten percent return but I have looked at literally thousands of specimens all over the world in the world's great museums. I get the curative permission to make a little slip and then I look in the stomach. It's like Christmas, I never know what I'm gonna find you, what did you find with crazy? Like? Like, uh, um, the largest meals that any snakes in the world eat away upwards of a hundred forty two d of their own mass. So you look like kind of a und guy. So imagine you eating a two ur and seventy pound cheeseburger with no utensils and no arms. You literally walk your head around a two and seventy found cheeseburger and then crawl off with it. That's that's what That's what vipers can do. And so I've I've spent and then sort of the second thing that I did and started doing was I wanted to watchnkes in the wild. I wanted to I wanted to see what they do. What's the craziest thing you found in a steaks gut? For? Like, the craziest thing ever? WHOA, I've seen a lot of crazy things, like five crazy things. This is interesting? Uh, Well, in an aquatic coral snake, which is a venomous cobra reality that lives in South America. I found five eels and they there were five of them there, and and one of them was only a tail left. It was the one that had been eating the longest ago, so it was the one most digested. And then as you went anteriorly in the gut, these items had been eaten more and more recently. And though it's recent one, it was a completely intact deal that's probably been eating just minutes before some biologists killed the squirrel snake and put it in the museum. That's pretty cool, right, that's um. Another one that was very insightful was I found a Pacific rattlesnake from California that had eating a ground squirrel. And the really interesting thing about vipers they have these long folding fangs and they have this tissue destructive cocktail venom that are made on a gland on each side of their head, you know. And basically, when a rattlesnake or any viper wants to kill a prey at him like a rabbit or a squirrel, it waits an ambush, it launches itself, it stabs these two hypodermic needles into the prey simultaneously compresses these two glands. It's essentially like it has a pair of hypodermic needles and the barrels filled with digestive and immobilizing cocktail. And so the rattlesnake goes like that, squirts in and releases almost instantly in a fraction of a second, minimizing the chance the rabbit of the squirrel might hurt it, and the rabbit of squirrel goes bounding off. One time, I one time we watched a rattlesnake bite a rabbit and the rabbit hopped ninety yards before it fell over. It took the rattlesnake almost three hours to find the rabbit, and it tracked the exact path of the rabbit. Turns out, rattlesnakes are putting a tracker molecule in their prey with the venom, and so it followed like the rabbit wind. It's it's smell or sense with its tongue, which is an older an odor carrier. There's a special organ in the roof of the mouth where the where the actual sensing happens, and the tongue carries in these odor molecules. So rattlesnake strikes the rabbit. The rabbit goes bounding off on this very irregular path over a rocky slope, and the rattlesnake takes this. The rattlesnake only about this big. It takes three hours, and I held my hands up. It takes it almost three hours, and it follows the precise security path of this rabbit. But the time it finds the rabbit, the rabbit is not only dead, but it's being digested from the inside out because the rabbit with its dying heartbeats, it's like it's like if you injected meat with a tender riser. It's in like actually some recipes you do inject meat with butter or whatever. Well, the rattlesnake has just injected two glands fulls of this the jestive enzyme cocktail and the rabbit, And as the rabbit bounds off dying, its own heartbeats are circulating these digestive enzymes throughout its tissue. So when the rattlesnake finally gets there and starts to walk its head over this meal that's maybe fifty of its mass, the rabbit is already digestion is already well underway. It's an incredible thing. How's that? I don't know what kind of species keep going? I read that, Um, I guess we should. I just asked, like the obvious question, what's the most frightening encounter you've had with a snake? With a snake? Uh? That's actually pretty easy, because I've almost never frightened of snakes. So I'm I'm long ago got over sort of macho showing off. In fact, um, I've actually calculated how risky is it to manhandle a vnom a snake? Pick it up, show off the fangs to the nearest uh fellow teenager, preferably a girl, you know. I mean that's that's sort of the old macho approach to venomous snakes, as you you man all of all that. When we now know that that's a stupid risk, it's not necessary, it's really hard on the snakes. We don't do it anymore. And I got over that, and so I've I've generally had a sort of risk adversitive, respectful approach to studying venomous snakes my whole life. But when I first started working in Costa Rica in about all of my venomous snake experience was with with pit vipers, mostly rattlesnakes in the US, which are in fact pretty easy to deal with. I mean, we could have a big rattlesnake in this room where we're sitting vid a snake hook. We could just keep talking. I mean, it's just it's just not that hard if you're respectful in what you're doing to work with us pitt vipers. So I get to Costa Rica and there's this really big snake. There's two of them, actually, but one of them, one of them, the more common it's called was used to be called a fertilence. Costa Ricans called them tertio pelo, which means velvet in Spanish. It's a massive snake. The big females are like six and a half to seven ft long. The head is the exaggerating to say it was as big as my hand, but it's a big head, really long. Aang's very toxic venom. It's the most dangerous snake in terms of killing people in Costa Rica by far. And I had no fuel experience with him, and so I really wanted to catch one, and I was I was at some part of this preserve where I was working, and somebody came and said, Harry, they've spotted a big fertile lance and in this little swamp below the bat tree, this place I knew, so so with my my assistant time, I literally jogged about a kilometer about a half mile over there, and I couldn't find it. So then I walked back to where i'd been in just a few minutes later they kind and they go, we spotted it. So we jogged another jogged this kilometer again and I sort of stumbled down this long slope and there's a big fertile lance and it's it's it's lying on the surface of this of this mud. And so I'm a little out of you know, I'm I wasn't thinking clearly, and so I have my big snake hook and I just slog into the mud and the snake draws back into a striking pose right at my feet, almost when I barely touched with the hook, and I'm and I'm thinking that I'm going well, actually, so what I thought was that I would go out like as if as a rattlesnake, and I would lift it on my snake hook over on the dry land and then I would bag it and I'd find some way to get it. So I slog out of the mud. It's it's crawling away from me. I touched it with my snake hook, and it whips around right at my feet and it's is facing up at me like like it's ready to strike, and and I was completely taken aback, and I the first thing I noticed was that I couldn't move. My my legs were stuck. I had gotten in just over my knees and I couldn't move. And the second thing I actually remember thinking, I wish I had a pistol, but I didn't, and so I raised my snake hook over my head and I thought, if if it's strikes, I'm going to try to I'm going to try to disable it with a blow. And instead it just turned around and took off into this one. The chances you could have disabled it, I don't know. I don't know. Fortunately we didn't have to. We didn't have to answer that because it just went away, which is what even really dangerous snakes almost always want to do. And I was I was so mired that somebody had to get a tree branch to get me out and Uh, that's the most uneasy I've been in in my life. I'm uneasy just listening to and that that happened a long time ago, and I've never done anything that's stupid Again, would have been a mis snakes, Is there how much of you thought about and read about just kind of our our relationship to stakes, the way we see them, kind of like their place in our culture throughout history a lot. It's a big theme in my current writing and research, And so how would you boil that down for folks, Like, what's the best way to think about how um humans approached snakes and and kind of the way that they are in our psyche? Because when I pictured that snake curled up and ready to strike you, it's demonic in my mind. Yeah. So, when I was writing my first book, which was about snakes as a review doing all this natural history literature, you know, I basically wanted to read everything I could find about all the snakes in the world in terms of what they do. And so I was just winnowing all this natural history literature over the last hundred and fifty years or so about snakes, and I encountered something I didn't expect, which was that every major group of primates, which is to say, lemurs, tar Sear's New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, and apes, including us, every major group of primates, I found observations of them both killing and being killed by snakes. And what what I thought was so fascinating was it it wasn't just the one. So if it was just that snakes are really dangerous to us, well fine, you know, so are cape buffalo. Yeah yeah, so fine, you know, I get spiders, you know. But it turned out it's not just that, it's that also not only humans, but other primates. They're attracted to snakes. They mobbed them, sometimes they pick up sticks and kill them, they throw stuff at them, sometimes they eat them. So it turns out capuchin monkeys in Brazil basically distinguished two kinds of snakes. One kind of snake is vipers, coral snakes and the mimics that look like them, and boas and all the other snakes several dozen species that a herpetologist would say are many different kinds, there's just one kind. They're the kind that's not a boa of viper or that's not dangerous, that's right. And so these Capuchian monkeys they find type. The first type, they make a big commotion, they throw stuff, they get sticks, they even kind of take sticks and jab them at the viper and the crevice. The other kind is grab and eat and throw the carcass down half eat. So even a non human primate like a capuchin that so so there and you when you get the people, it's all the place you have. Sure you have people that hate snakes, but then you have the whole cultures that deify them. You know, they're people. You don't kill cobras in India. You know people in the Eastern US who handle rattlesnakes as part of their scriptural and turn reportation of the Bible. You know. So there's there's this what I find fascinating ambivalence. And I think the reason is that, on the one hand, if you don't see the snake that either wants to eat you or is scared of you, you can get hurt really badly, really quickly. Your whole life can change and maybe end in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, a snake is about the easiest vertebrate animal to disable on Earth. I mean, it's basically one long vertebral column, a good hard blow any place along that column. You've you've got a disabled snake, and you can eat it. It's a fine chocolate protein. So I think that that's at the heart of it, that it goes way back. So I I give talks on this, this this general topic, and I call it the seventy five million year old Deadly Dialogue because snakes are about a hundred million years old and primates are about seventy five million years old. So every since primates have been on Earth, we've only been around almost apiens actually only a few hundred thousand years. So we have this long history and it's a it's a heritage, you know, and it's it's a fraught one. It's it's it's fraught with both the possibility of an easy meal, it's fraught with a certain fascination. I mean, what the heck, no legs, two penises. I mean, that's ah, there you go. Well, there used to be one that said snakes have something extra big picture of a snake penis, but uh so there you know, it's a very fraught relationship. And uh many people think that we are innately afraid of snakes. I think that's probably not true. I think it's pretty clear we we we have built in mechanisms that make it easier to recognize snakes than other things. But I think the fear part probably gets connected within an individual based on experience, teach, so forth. I think those connections are made right the Serpent. Like most cartoons, my son watches a thing called the Gruffalo and the snake comes out. He goes, Oh, a snake. He doesn't know. He he grew up in UH for his first two years in Texas and then moved to Montany. He's never seen a snake. I've never had an instance to talk to him about a snake. Yet when he sees one on a show that is kind of a it's not a bad or good snakes. Snakes just a character in the little thing he's watching. He's he's fascinated. He and when when a fox walks out, he doesn't go look a fox. But when a snake comes out, I don't know. Like I said, I don't know if it's just the nature of what it is or how it looks or how it moves, and it's the unique characteristics. There are definitely features that define snakiness and UH. One study, for example, involved this has been done with both children and with macaques kind of monkey. Um, you show him a screen that has like nine different images and they images vary from flowers to mushrooms, to spiders to snakes, a bunch of stuff. And then, uh, you set this up so that the subject as they're called, is rewarded for picking out something they're shown. So they're shown something and said, until pick this out. What turns out if you give a child or a macaque a second or more, they can pick pick out with equal facility a spider, a mushroom, or snake. If you cut it down to about six hundred milliseconds, it's just over half a second. They can still pick out spiders and snakes. If you cut it down to three hundred milliseconds, so only about a quarter of a second, they can only pick out snakes, which is just consistent with lots of other studies that suggest we have some sort of recognition mechanisms at the level of brains, like, yeah, that's right, that's right. And many of us who worked in the field, and this has happened to me. I once was working coaster RecA. The other big viper there is called a bushmaster. It's even bigger. It's it's doesn't cause nearly as many accidents, but it's a massive it's the biggest viper in the world. And I had a radio transmitter in one we surgically implanted, and so I was looking for that that snake. It was a smallish one, like four or five ft long. Had two other experienced herpetologists with me, and it was in the middle of the day. Well you know, you can see, and all of a sudden, I knew there was a huge bush master that I just bumped my right foot against. And I knew it at some preconscious level because I I screamed an expletive and had to shove this even bigger guy to my left out of the way, because I knew that I just woke up this like seven seven a half foot bushmaster on my right foot, and it was drawing back. I don't think it was drawing back to strike. I think it was I had literally woken it up. We're both drawing back. We were making equally appropriate responses, you know, But I know that recognition and that action skipped all sorts of conscious functions. Do you feel like we've had other Violetis on that spend a lot of time around a certain species, you whether it's a grizzly bear or something else, and they always seem to have different feelings for the thing that they've studied. Where where do you land with snakes? You have an affection for them? Yeah, yeah, I you know snakes that A thing that's tough about snakes is that you can't read them very well. So they don't have eyelids, they don't have lips like mammals, do you know. So I love I especially love dogs. I have two labs, you know, and and I you know, I talked to them all the time. I love them dearly. I'm totally distraught if anything's wrong with either one, you know. And it's it's a little harder to get that way about snakes because you don't get as much affect. You don't you don't feel that. And I think a lot of us, including me, I used to think there wasn't much in there. And just in the last ten years or so, twenty years, but last time especially, we've discovered parental care. We've discovered what's called aloe parenting. That's when one mom takes care of somebody else's babies, so it turns out rattlesnakes have aloe parenting. We've discovered uh snakes modifying their ambush environment to solve a problem that may not actually occur for several days. So here here's an example that this is. This is maybe the coolest thing I've ever seen in the field. I was watching a big blacktail rattlesnake in the Chericogo Mountains of Arizona. It was actually male number forty, and he's in the one I wrote down radio collared fifty black tail ratle snakes in Arizona. Well, they're not collared because you can't put a collar on snake, but implants implant. Yeah, And we so that's how we discovered parental care and them and stuff, because we were watching these moms, these pregnant moms, and we thought they were just going to give birth and their babies to leave, because that's what we all knew happened. And they gave birth and they didn't they didn't leave. They stayed with their babies and all this cool stuff happened, you know. And then it turns out ten days after birth, the baby said there's getting the first time that the whole thing ends. Then, so we document all that, but the slowly mind blowing this thing. As we were watching this big male and he was cruising through a little shady, cobbled dry stream bed, and all of a sudden, he stops abruptly and he starts tongue flicking meticulously about two square yards of leaf litter, which I later found had a chipmunk trail going right through it. I found the runway, but we didn't know that first. So he tonue flicks for thirteen minutes. I've got my stop watch running, I'm watching with binoculars, my collaborator, the Tusun physicians watching, and then he after thirteen minutes, he he coils into the stereotyped ambush posture that a viper uses when it's gonna sit and wait for something to come by. And they may wait, incidentally, for days or even weeks for that animal to come by. So he gets already. And that was cool to watch, but we knew that's what they did. What happened next, though, was there was a dead fern, a brown dried fern, about eight inches right in front of his face, who was right in his prospective strike path. It would beat as if you got set up. I was just to ambush a deer, and then there's there's all these saplings in the way this snake is cut exactly, you know, and that's what he did. So we're watching, you know, and all of a sudden he reaches out with this very stereotype posture. It looks sort of like a shepherd's crook, and it's what Mayo rattlesnakes used to fight with other rattlesnakes. So if you look up on YouTube, just look for rattlesnakes fighting, you'll see what I'm talking about. They rise up in the air and they push each other down, and they use the stereotype little cook in their neck for the pushing down parts, like arm wrestling. But this guy did it, and he pushed the fern out of the way. He bent the fern down and then went back into his ambush posture. And I was like, no, what he's gonna believe me because I didn't have a video camera. And I turned to Dave and I said, what you just see? And he said, wow, he built he bent that fern down. I go, yeah, and then I'm writing my notes, you know. A few years later, a former post doc mind ruling Clark as a professor at San Diego State. Now he started using remote videography to study rattlesnake behavior, and he got video of multiple rattlesnakes making these ambush tunnels through brush in California. And so they're trying to ambush California ground squirrels, and they'll stick their body out and kind of beat, beat in all directions and sort of form this little hollow in the brush where they're gonna strike squirrel. They're hunting. They're hunting in there, and as you say, it's a perfect analogy, they're perfect. Who would I believed it? I mean, if I told you panda did that, you might think it's true. And if I told you I'm a cat or a chimpanzee, did it. Sure? But this is a rattlesnake. It does not have a big brain, and it's and it's doing all this cool stuff. Do you feel like one thing that strikes me about like the your proximity of these at these creatures, and like knowing them so much, what do you what do you think about their place in the natural world? What did you I'm sure you've thought about that at length I have, And what about their place in our world? That that would be the second question we could ask. I mean, it's pretty clear, uh, they are predators, you know. And so actually their predators sort of out of proportion to their body size because they can eat things so big. So, for example, I mentioned bushmasters in Costa Rica. The bushmaster might weigh four to ten pounds. It eats the same prey that a thirty five pound oscilotte eats. Okay, so a western diamondback rattlesnake, a big western back rattlesnake, might weigh four or five or really big one, maybe ten pounds. It's eating the same thing that a bobcat our coyote eats that outweighs it by a factor of like four or something. That's because there's a snake, you know. And so they are at the same level in a food pyramid or a food web as a mammal that weighs several times what they do, so they play important roles like that. We're actually still kind of finding out what they do. And the coolest thing lately is it turns out their seed dispersers, so you know, uh, plants, when they make seeds and fruit and all that, we might think they make it so we can have tasty breakfast. But the plant is really dispersing its offspring when it makes fruit, you know, it hopes, it hopes that something will eat the fruit, pass it through its gut, and the seeds will go through, get pooped out, and go somewhere else. That's how it that's how that's that's how it disperses. That's how it says. It's kids off to college. It was a term that somebody used recently, ecosystems services absolutely, and I was like that, like click something in my head, like yeah, man, yeah, all of these things are doing a service to the that's right. So it turns out we discovered accidentally one of my former students when we were looking at the museum guts. Uh, they're all these black things, these little black dots in the gut of these desert rattlesnakes. What we're really looking at, we think is fur and teeth and digested mammal. And he showed it to me through a microscope and I went, I don't know, maybe their seeds whatever didn't didn't hit me. And then he calls me back in and he he shows me out of the holding. So this is the end of the gut, and I don't know how just I'm going to describe it to you, but what word. It looked like this. There was a little little seedling coming of it. So we found germinated seeds in the colons of these rattlesnakes. These rattlesnakes are eating kangaroo rats, which have pouches. So the kangaroo rat goes around picking up all these seeds, stuffing its pouch like a hamster goes into its burrow, takes all it out and has a little cache. You know, the plant is hoping that some fraction of those seeds won't ever actually get eaten and will germinate in this nice, cool, dark moist place. That's the plant's bet. You know, Well, if that plant, if the seeds from that plant end up in the pouch of a kangaroo rat that gets eaten by a sidewinder, which is not a very big rattlesnake, that plant just hit the dispersal jackpot because the sidewinder rattlesnake has a home range radius of like five to ten times what the kangaroo rat is just rolling around the ground dropping seat. That's right, that's right. So there's another ecosystem service for you. I love that term. I don't know why it struck me, like, yes, because we're thinking about biodiversity, that's thinking about what you know, we're we're not very serviceable creatures when it comes to a lot of things that we do. But when you start thinking about the game that we pursue and the way we think about elk and stuff like that, there every animal you see as a service, that service to the elk and vice versa. And so that second question which you inspired me to bring up, though, we could also talk about, well, what what would be the place of rattlesnakes in our lives? You know? And of course one response was their their potential death threat, so we should get rid of them whenever possible. In fact, uh, we now know why you die from rattlesnake bite. We know how to know how to prevent it. Snake bite is a very low public health problem in this country. It's a huge public health problem in some countries, but that's because of lack of adequate medical carecter. So once you you know, when I try to teach people to appreciate rattlesnakes, I always start out by admitting the danger and being very candid about it. So I think that's the way to go. I think that's the way to go with the elephants, with bison and anything that could hurt you, is to start out by being honest about not trying to hide from it, and then you talk about how you can ameliorate those dangers, and then you can enjoy this incredible stuff. Like I can see the look on your face when I'm telling you about the rabbit going one yards and then then then she finds it and eats it, and she just got one third of her annual grocery bill in one predation event. How can you not marvel at that? I just like, how can you not think your world is richer? I took the wrong damn job. Should have been a herpetize something I told my wife, like a couple of weeks can shake it. Well, what what? What do you think about the future? So I want to go back to the wild left biologists? You know why? It's because there's so much understanding that you miss or well, I guess I put it the other way. There's so much out there that you could know, You know so much of the intricacy of the natural world that you could know, and it informs everything that you do, everything that you do. And that's why I like Tracks and Shadows so much, because it was like kind of a transcendental meditation of all the thing is kind of in a gumbo, like all the experiences connect to each other, and you can live a more enlightened life if you understand a snake and what it does for ecosystem and how it germinates a seed and how that seed comes from a mouse, and how that mouse ate seed and how that plant hops to do those things, and those understandings are seminal to our lot, like there they are what we are. Um. Yeah, And I think when you become a more candid, blatant participant, I mean I think a lot of especially you know, first world modern humanity, is we've we've ironically distanced ourselves from nature. I'd say ironic because I think some of the real champions of environmentalism, on the one hand, bemoan that we're dis junct from nature. And then there then they don't. They're there whole kinds of activities they don't want to participate in, which are actually being part of nature instead of being it indirectly, you know, they're their environmentalism at some level, kind of hatchment. That's right. I believe that's true. They become somewhat more spectators than participants. And so as you can tell if from reading my book. And there's a reason why it's the next last chapter because and it's called Born Again Predator and so here here I spent my whole life studying predators and thinking about what that entails, ecologically, psychologically, all these things. And then I then I get to go there. And I tried to tell the reader what it was like to have had the life I've had and then to go there, And I hope I succeeded in en showing that it was. It was really transformative to me. It really, Uh it was. It was. It was a life enhancing experience and has been ever since. Yeah, I've read as many accounts as I give my hands on that's similar to yours, kind of of what the natural world gives and what you give it and kind of a life lived like that. And I think this was one of the best I've ever read. And you had I wrote something down. I wanted to make sure miss that you wrote that our psyches are linked to predators. With wildness like or like the way that we are, like the reason we think about even charismatic megafaunal or the opposite. You know, we think about them in different ways. You know, they're they're connected to us in different ways. Some people I think that manifests itself in like a sympathy. We're talking before you hit record about sympathy, right, they have a sympathy for bears or a sympathy for UH predators and other people. There's like an understanding that leads to empathy that allows you to kind of understand their place a little bit better. And some people, I just I would imagine use their disconnect via fear. You know. So there's lots of ways you can do. You can link to a predator, but talk about that for you, like what what that means to be linked to a predator with with a psyche? Yeah, and to the prey to I mean, we we are potential prey and we used to be. We're not so much in the United States anymore, al though in some places you might still be. Yeah. And so you know, I told you I'm interested in the book I'm writing now. I'm interested in especially in this world world word wild because in the US, and I think it really is fair to say it's a it's an especially North American environmentalist twentieth century perspective. We've and twenty one now, we we tended to define wildness in terms of whether or not people are sort of functionally part of it all. We've defined them out of it. And you know, the first thing you can say is, well, how about words like Shoshone and Comanche and things like that. Um. But another thing is that, uh, like we were talking about earlier, there's this irony of wanting bemoaning that we're not part of nature, that we're dis junct. In fact, the masthead for Friends of the Earth back when I, as a Berkeley professor said not man apart, which is a line from a Robertson Jeffer's point, not man apart bemoaning being apart from nature. And yet we've done all this stuff that keeps us, I think, makes us ever more distant from the fact that we are inevitably, ultimately functioning parts of ecosystems. You know, food goes in, food goes out. If there's a lot of it, we're gonna eat. If there's a lot of us, we're gonna be eating a lot of things of one sort or another, and a lot of stuff is gonna come out, and we're gonna have to deal with both of that. And we've we've done these things, especially as modern first world people, to almost like hide from that. And so I'm I'm all for getting people back out in nature. I don't make fun of vegans. I don't. I don't make fun of other people's life choices, especially about ethical issues, you know. But and so I think there's ways that they can do it too. I mean they can, they can farm, they can they can admit that if you if you clear a place to make a soy feel or an almond orchard, there'll be almost no biodiversity left, and those animals will not go somewhere else. We'd all like to hope that they go somewhere else. They mostly don't make that point in your book as well as say like we think that that all these organisms when if we, you know, we're a bit of a virus or a bacteria, we move into a place and we clear it off and we kind of remove its natural way. Like there's almost there's no in our country, no undisturbed dirt that I can think of even in wilderness there these are these are yeah to some extent. And so you know, we we define native as some length of time that we've we've prescribed. Oh that's native. Is this many years? Well that's that's just a thing that we've said. And so at some point I wonder how do we how we put all that stuff together? You know, how how we get to a point where we really understand what we are within nature? And whether it's I often look at somebody smarter than me. I once read it like if you're flying in a plane, say you're over Yellowstone National Park, they'll be the splendor. And I fly over these areas a lot. There's it's like it seems pristine and untouched. And as you move towards Los Angeles, it seems as if the earth has gotten some sort of sickness. And as you move towards Los Angeles, the sickness gets increasingly evident. And as you get to Los Angeles, it looks like some bacteria has grown in an area and it looks very unhealthy. If you are if you were to like if an alien came down, And so for me, I think that's true, but that doesn't there's echoes environmentalism in that thought. But for me, I feel like, yes, I we are that. But how do I make sure I understand my peace and that greater giant organism That gets just getting a little deep. But how do I understand my peace of that greater giant organism than I am? I don't. I don't hate myself for being a part of it. How do I be a better part of it? And what does it all mean? And I think the environmentalist might say, like, I hate humans for being what they are, and I'm sure you don't intend to, and I certainly I want to say that. I'm I don't mean to stereotype all environmentalists is one thing, and I get all that, but I think there is a brand of a segment of environmentalism, And especially in the US, I don't think you would see it nearly as much in Latin America if you were talking to conservation, conservation by all just the nature lovers there, I don't think you'd see as much in Europe. It's it's a sort of a privileged notion of you know, that's that's if we could it all be like that, and we would only take pictures and leave only footprints, and I've kind of think that that's that's that's not the way forward. So I think we all start with realizing that we can't escape our presence and and all this sort of like, uh, it's sort of like anthropophobic or something, you know, it's it's a and I find I just can't embrace that. I mean, I am a person. I had a mother and father I have I'm married to somebody, I have a brother, I have a niece I love. I mean, you say you want to get rid of five out of the seven billion people on Earth right now, Well, which five billion would you pick? You know you're going to be the privilege one that gets to say so I I just it's not that I don't understand feeling like that. I just don't think it gets us very far. And so I want to push us starting by admitting that we're all part of nature. We never were apart from it. We still eat, we still poop, we still you know, we're all part of it. And now what can we do to preserve as much of the rest of this biological heritage that four billion years of evolution have left us with? You know that we can all how can we make it so that your grandkids might at least have the option of deciding whether they're excited about seeing a rattlesnake or an elephant. Wouldn't it wouldn't just just twelve thousand years ago, there were five or six kinds of elephant relatives in the United States. They're just that's less than twice the age of a bristle colmb pine tree. So forget about the end of the place to seem being ancient, it was only twelve thousand years ago. The last mammoth on Earth was about thirty years ago, about the time Babylon was being sacked. So we used to have a much more diverse world. It's we're simplifying it at a horrifically fast pace. Wouldn't it be terrible if there are no elephants lefted? How would you like to have to tell your grandkids, Wow, we used to have the thing called elephants. No ship, we really did. They had this, They had a trunk. They weren't just in pictures. We had them, but we don't anymore. You wouldn't it be that's the I think that's the worst outcome. What a stain the worst outcome And and I think of you know, people that don't agree with hunting, like I think that hunting might lead to less elephants, if done right, it's a prescription for more. It might be, it might be I think that. I think the elephant thing in particular is very complex. But the fact is every elephant will die too, just like I was talking about that earlier with there you know, every bird will die. I think I didn't quite finish my thought about the birds. But here's these three billion birds killed by cats. All those birds are gonna die anyway. So the issue is when, how frequently, and what will be the consequence of the particular way that they die, And that's that's what we want to know. If if cats are killing birds at a rate that is causing birds to plummet in terms of sustainable population, that's a really big deal. If cats are a source of mortality of birds, but bird populations were remaining constant, that would be a very different picture. And so I don't feel like I'm in a point to position to prescribe what we should do for most of these problems. But I think starting by admitting that we are inevitably part of nature is really important and I think getting out and participating, fishing, gardening, farming, hunting, those are those are ways of of really owning up to the fact that we are indeed participants. Yes, I read another paper that you were called Rewilding our Lives. It's great, and you said there's a couple of questions you ask, But the most point in one, I think is how wild a world do we want as opposed to how wild a world we will tolerate. I think that's an interesting juxtaposition, because we all in our minds want this Yellowstone National Park wild world that's both accessible to us but also wild. Does it really those two things will come at odds they could, they will adeptably, and so I think we've got to negotiate a whole set of relationships, you know. And I sort of imagined that that that conceptually it would be almost like concentric circles outward from pure wildness. But I would say that even pure wildness on both places, most places on Earth have a place for human presence, and the issue is how much presence, what are we doing there and so forth. So I think the only places that were ever wild in the sense of take only pictures and leave only footprints, where the pollar, the polls, even the Inner Sahara has had people that work there, you know. So I I really am interested in exploring the difference between this kind of pure wilderness notion in which people don't really have any place at all. That's the key thing at all. Nobody denies that if you put tens of thousands of people living in Yellowstone will lose a lot. I'm not arguing for that, but I am arguing that that, Um, people have always been parts of all this. Yeah, there's levels to it, right. So somebody described Yellows to me like an ambassador for the natural world. There's people who would never have the wherewithal to understand what you understand from your your years of work. Um, you just don't have the interest in it. Different people have different interests. Some people have more urban interests and that's what they do their cultural society. They like to be around these buzzing hives of energy, human energy. They don't they don't long for things that that you and I probably long for, which is being alone or being with a few people out in the middle of nowhere. So like Yellowstone becomes an ambassador for those those folks. They can go and see it, and that's just a level of kind of the natural world. It's kind of like the top level that you can see, but there's so many deeper things that you can get into. And for somebody like me, I just over the last couple of years, I've realized that I can't really operate without deeper levels of understanding. And that's just me. That's not everybody, but my I'm not happy without that, you know if I and hunting is just a good way for me to find a deeper level of understand absolutely, But for herpetology is another way. And you've you've had some crazy some crazy uh that you had a jaguar story too, didn't you. From being in Costa Rica, I've been around jaguar's a fair amount. I've only actually seen one once and it was just just fleeting. My crossed the trail in front of us at night and we it's squinted at us through it in our flashlight and then it disappeared. You know, many times, especially in their early in the eighties where I worked, it was not uncommon to find their droppings and sometimes really fresh. I mean you you almost imagined you could see steam coming up you know. And jaguar droppings are big. I mean, that's we're talking big, you know. And often you can see that this one is all peckory for or this one's got a sloth claw and it or something like that and so, and they're in their tracks. Jaguar tracks are really splay. I'm like puma track. So puma tracks tend to be more parallel sided. And a big puma might have a footprint like something like that, you know, for it, And a big jaguar track because they tend to occur and moisture habitats and walk on their toes. Their toes are kind of splayed. So a big jaguar track is it. I mean, I can only imagine a tiger track. I've never seen. I've never been around tigers. I wish, But yeah, do you do you think of you know, I think I keep going back to tracks and shadows because it it just was. It struck me in a lot of ways. Um, it took you a long time to get there, right, that you had to take a lot of When I was reading and I was thinking of the concept of you had to you had to spend a lot of time and like micro moments like a lot of studying, you know, SCAT and these things you're talking about that like really on the ground moments, and there was like there must have been a time in your life where you were able to take it to a macro level and start started to think about it. You're overall understanding of the things you've learned from those micro instances. Can you give people a like, was there a moment where you start to think, Man, I gotta write this book. I gotta meditate on everything I've learned, everything I've done, because I think, to me, at least that's an interesting inspection. Well, by coincidence, it involves Montana the answer. So, um, it's the early eighties. Uh, I'm a I'm an assistant professor coming up for ten year pretty soon at Berkeley. I'm writing signed papers because that's the pint of the realm, that's what that's the last stage of doing scientific scholarship is to publish a peer reviewed paper. So that's what I'm doing, and that's that's my job to do that. But I am in my early thirties. I'm out of the army. I'm so glad I didn't have to go to Vietnam at the last minute. You know, I'm I already had the amblean stuff. I've been divorced twice, and all these things are swirling around, you know, and I'm thinking, God, I want to write something else, you know, I want to write about what this other stuff means. And a friend gives me a book called A River Runs Through It by Norman McClay. Yeah, and I it's just a little book, you know, it's actually three stories, but it's the title novella. I think that that blew my mind. I just I read it in one sitting, and I I saw the possibility of non uh, because I had thought, well, you know, if you want to write about these life and death things, you gotta write fiction. And I know Hemingway or I don't know Jim har I didn't know about Jim Harrison yet at that point, and so I had this misconception that I would never do that because I don't know how to write, and I couldn't see myself writing fiction. And then I read A River Runs Through It, which is only scarcely fiction, it's you know, and I saw what he could. There's a single paragraph in which, in the middle of a paragraph, his brother abruptly gets killed in an alley, and I thought to myself, that's how it really is. That's that's how when you get the phone call from your mom and you think she's calling to tell you to invite you for dinner, and it turns out Marsha has been murdered, her first lover has been murdered. That's what that's what that's what literature can do. I saw that McLean did that in that paragraph, you know, just going along. It's a Presbyterian father. I went, I went fly fishing, and my brother was killed in an alley. You know, Jesus, you know this is this is something. So Norman McClain by then was an elderly retired English professor at the University of Chicago, and you probably know all this. Many publishers turned down that book, and Chicago published it as the first worst work of fiction, the University of Chicago Press, and every published and at first it started out slow, and then eventually, you know, gazillions and all these languages and stuff. So I knew the editor at Chicago at that time, and I this is before so we're talking snail mail, and I write her and I go, oh my god, Susan, I just read the most incredible book from your press. The River runs through it. And I went on for like three paragraphs about why this book just captured me, and she writes me back. A couple weeks later, I get back from her and she goes, well, Norman comes in to get his royalty check from time to time, and I showed him your letter and he says, this guy can write. He should write a book. And so she says, Norman thinks she should write a book. So then I I've got an address, and I wrote to Norman McLain. I said, Dr McLaine, I'm I'm coming to Chicago to do some snake work at the Field Museum, but I'd like to take you out to dinner. And he writes me back. He says, I'll take you to dinner to the Faculty Club. So I get on a plane, I fly to Chicago. I do my work in the Field Museum looking at the stomach contents, and I have dinner with Norman McClean. He's like eighty years old. And the first thing he tells me that surprised me is that he's written another book. And I go, oh, really, what's it about? And he says it's called young Men in Fire and I go, oh, wow, what's that about. Oh, it's about this tragic fire, you know. And he says, but I've got about another year's worth of work to do on it. And that was that took me back, because I thought that great writers had just spilled from their pen, you know, and here he's telling me he's finished the manuscript, but he's got another year of work to do on it. So and then I thought, well, you know, I'm gonna have dinner and I'm gonna tell him about going into burning buildings and saving people and all this stuff, you know, being an amulist driver. And he he didn't seem very interested in it. And several times during the dinner he said, why don't you write up? He said, why do you want to work with those goddamn rattlesnakes? Why don't you go right about that? He was very he was very uh, he sort of veered between erudite professor and vulgar cowboy. And he says, why do you why do you want to work those goddamn rattlesnakes? You should go write about that. And on the plane back to California, I thought, you know, he's right, I'm not ready to write about that. I don't think I don't know myself remotely well enough to write about this life and death stuff. But I'm gonna write a book about snakes that tries to go modestly in that direction. So my Snake Book starts out with my dinner with Norman McClain. So in the in the prologue, Norman McClaine poses the question to me, why snakes? And then I wrote the chapters to my Snake Book. So there were little essays at the start of each chapter that we're about the topic, but more personal. And these essays run through the book, and they ended an epilogue which gave my best answer in to the question why snakes. When I finished the Snake Book, by then it was fifteen years later and I was ready to start thinking about that one. So that's how it happened. Sorry, I was such a long story, but I think they had to admit that it was the deadliness of it was the violence, and it was it was me commsily, inarticulately, never quite conclusively, grappling with having a kid die in my arms and trying to save people with gunshot ones their chest and stuff, you know, and and you know, when you go out and you watch a rattlesnakes strike a rabbit, you can kind of you can kind of at least shed all that human stuff and you can confront what is surely nake. It's surely violence. It is it's a violent act that you it doesn't have all that other baggage. And so you can just sit there and and think about that. You know, life, life, death, one life left, you know, all the stuff. So that was the It's a little more complicated, but that was the answer to the Snake book. Catharsis of something absolutely absolutely and both books were cathartic. I mean, there was no doubt that writing Snakes, even though I was only sort of tangentially dealing with these things. And in the epilogue of Snakes, I talked only a little bit, only as much as I needed to and as unsentimentally as I could about some of the experiences I had as a young man. And then yeah, and then I was ready to like take take a deep breath and go okay. And actually, one more thing is that back when I decided, when I met Norman McLain and decided I wasn't ready to write it. I did. I was worried I would forget stuff. And so right after we word processing came along, and you know, keyboards, I wrote a stream of conscious this memoir one summer. I just tried to remember dialogue and smells and sounds and the relatively little emotion that I did feel that I was aware of, and I wrote it all down, just without worrying at all about the quality of the pros, and I put it in a spiral notebook and stuck in a file cant and like literally ten fifteen years later, when I started trying to write tracks and shadows, I pulled that out and I had things in there that I I fear I would not have remembered fifteen years later. It's like a strange time machine to pull that out, and I think, now, I'm you know, gosh, if you traveled ten years back in time and interviewed yourself, you're like, wow, Yeah, there's an interesting idiot there, Like, well, I wonder what he's going to get into. Yeah, well, maybe you're going to write a book. I hope someday. Have you thought about that? I have, and I thought about it in much the way that you have thought about it, and kind of like, at what stage in your life are you ready to reflect and introspect and what at what points in your for you ready to just like study and and sift and look through things and learn things. And that's why when I was reading your book, that's what I was thinking of. I'm like, here's a person who's done all these things and is spilling them out, but in such a way that leads to this conclusion, which is informed by all these experiences. You know, and if you were if you would have wrote that book when you were thirty, it wouldn't have been as good as it is. And and so I think about that as a writer, you know, and writing is so damn painful. It's the worst. I talked to writers on this podcast all the times. It's like it's it's like, what's writing like for you? I'm like, well, what's the worst thing? Ever? It's really wonderful too, though, Oh it's I mean like pain and and and pain is wonderful in lots of ways, especially when it's like some artistic pain. It's almost like writing is the pain, and writing is what makes it good. Um, So I think about that and I'll write a book one day that that maybe meditates on all the things and and try and try to do that. But I I'm not there, just quite yet. I don't want to rush it. Yeah, well, I hope you make it the end of Tracks and Shadows, I will. I got one two chapters. In fact, I read the last chapter the Cowboy. I do well, go pick up Tracks and Shadows. That's just the one that I liked the most. But there's a lot of other books by Mr Harry Green here that you should go pick up and and then learn about his life. It's a pretty badass. Thanks. All right, Thanks Harry. Great talking to you too. Yeah, I hope we hope we go for a hike someday we're gonna go, Yeah, with an elk at the end. We should do that, well, hopefully and elk maybe. Or if I was gonna encounter Rattlesnake, I'd be I'd be comfortable with you there. But what do I do now? As I'll tell you, I have one rattlesnake story because I lived in Texas and hunted in Texas, UH for four years. I was hunting access to her in the hill country. A couple of years ago, and I was sitting there was it was during, it was during, well they don't have a rut but there was some rutting access here around me, and there was just roaring access there a hundred yards. I got my bow and I'm like I kept working in on him, and he'd be chasing the dough and working on me chasing the dough. I'm like, man, I'm just gonna sit down. I'm just gonna calm down, sit down, Maybe he'll come walking by. So I sat down just up against this old scrub boak tree and put my feet out. I had snake boots on up to my knees. I sat there and uh, about five minutes go by and this box, you know, I could see him two hundred yards away, just running in his thick mesquite and I could see him, and I was like, well, I'm just not gonna I'm just gonna hope that he comes over here. And just about that time, I I felt something kind of like touching my hip and I just reached down to like brush my jacket away, and I looked back down and there was like a six ft rattlesnake that had that had breached my knee and was crawling over my boot. His rattle was about at my and my first all was, oh cool, a snake. And then slowly as he was like making his way down my boot and up over the foot and down, and then I quickly switched my mind, hold ship, Oh my god, what do I do? And I and I just sat there long enough to let him kind of get over my boot. And I ran like a little girl for like three yards and I turned back and he didn't even he just kept on going. He turned and looked at me kind of like in an annoyed fashion, and I wish he would have just chilled out, but he didn't try to. He didn't coil to strike or anything. Just you have to remember one month. This one, I want to say it was in June, so that that quite possibly they tend to mate a little later than that. But they also have some spring mating in western dinadbacks that that quite possibly, based on size, it was almost certainly a male, and when they're they can distinguish. I don't actually know where they can even perceive that where a nonreceptive female has been so rattlesnakes generally don't breed every year of the females, it takes them more than one year to building up fat to make a litter, so only at most every other year, sometimes only every three or four years. A female is receptive to breed that summer to produce a litter the next summer. So that's their that's their social system. And so because females, if you imagine that there the sex ratio is equal in any one summer, there's a lot more males looking for females and there are receptive females, right, And so when males are on the trail, females they stop eating. They just sound familiar, so they're just like they're just going run, and so they try they crawl these long, fairly straight routes. It turns out, if you're looking for a trail and you don't know where it is, a straight line is like that is like the right search strategy. You just cut a direction that's right. And so that's what they do. And so I've watched them many times. A male rattlesnake during the breeding season is just like crawling about a about a body length a minute, flicking, flicking, clicking, flicking, flicking enough act. Really a few times seen one when he encountered a trail, because then everything changes. He starts crawling in this very circuitous much slower, and if you keep with him, you'll find him. He'll locate a female. You know, so this I wouldn't be surprised if that guy, he couldn't have cared less about you. You didn't smell like a rabbit or a squirrel, you didn't act threatening, and you weren't a receptive female. So you were just there were just one more like nose rock or log or what? Do you feel that when there's a snake on top of you crawling right, there's a little bit of a helpless this feeling, But then you realize, like he's got all the power really in this situation. But you know what if he had if you had been like say, just a few feet away, and you'd tossed a stick or something, and he snapped into that big exaggerated strike coil and started buzzing like crazy, the big long, slow tongue flick when they as long as you, as long as you were, like, let's say, if you really want to be super careful ten feet away, nothing's gonna happen the ral snake you've seen unless you're standing on it when you see it, are putting your hand on it when you see it. It's pretty much not dangerous to you anymore. It's it's the one you haven't seen that that could hurt you, or the one you interfere with. A huge fraction of snake bites in the US, not in Senegal or India, but but in the US, a huge fraction of snake bites are people purposely messing with a snake? You think snakes to have an opinion of us? I think they. I think they just want to avoid us. Yeah, I don't think they much like anything else. Yeah, there's no predatory I wonder how I was thinking. I wonder if the snake has an opinion of what's going on, because he looked I remember looking at it, like look pretty annoyed the situation, Like, well, I'm going probably, like you said, I'm going to find receptive female and anything isn't that is annoying to me. Yeah. We had, uh you know what you read. We had fifty snakes with radios in them, and the one we had the most experience with it was a female. She was a young, an adult female. When we first put a radio in her, and we watched her for twelve years. So twelve years later she was a very senior female and we had I think it was five and sixty nine encounters with her. I wasn't in on all of them, but me and my collaborator and UM, I think during that twelve years we had to catch her three or four more times to change her batteries basically, but our our whole handling protocol was super gentle. So I don't think I ever heard that snake rattle during all the times we captured her, anesthetized or put her radio and released her and so. And the significance of that is that, uh, one time I was looking for and I was by myself, and I had the radio antenna and I had her signal, and it was getting louder and louder, so I knew as closer and closer, and I was looking ahead, looking ahead, and I'd start walking from different directions and I'd always get the same vector to the last signals pointing at this juniper tree, and I was looking at my binoculars under it, and I couldn't see her. And I find a side as improbably is. It seemed to me that she was somehow buried under the duff, under the litter, under the tree. So I took the antenna off and was going to use the cable as a really short distance detector. And I crawled all the way around the juniper tween in my hands and knees, poking the cable at the ground and nothing. I can't find a goddamn snake. So I I finally sit up right against the trunk. It was sort of a big tree with drooping limbs, and I sit up with my head kind of among the limbs, and I literally started daydreaming about a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, because it made me think about something called a gumption trap, where you're you're not you're not making head away because you're making a false assumption about what you're doing. So I was saying and thinking, what what is my false assumption? And I had this weird sensation. I tilted my head slightly to the left and female one was sitting on a limb right next to my face. Her head was literally three or four or five inches from my face, and she didn't so much as flick her tongue, she didn't rattle, she didn't flick her tongue, she didn't bite me, she didn't do anything, And of course I I just very slowly moved away. And when I walked away, she was still sitting there with that movie. So I think it's possible. I don't want to like overly anthropomorphize the situation, but I think it's certainly reasonable to think that I never taught her to be afraid of me. I'm not saying we were pals. I'm not saying she recognized me, But I think it's it's I never taught her to be afraid of me. And I think if every time I had encountered that snake, I had pinned her down and picked her up by the head and showed her fangs off to somebody and kind of roughed her up, I think she would have been a much more defensive snake in the presence of whatever ME meant to her. And I think I could have ended up getting bitten out of the face, which would have been Would you think they have this this predatory of the molecule you mentioned when they're so they got a tracker molecule, they're using that kind of sophisticated biological markers they got to know you. They gotta understand like different, you know, things in their environment that that are similar and repetitive. They got to know that. Absolutely. It only makes sense. It makes sense, it would be it would be unparsimonious to think otherwise. Wo, we don't want to be that. No, we don't want to do that. We don't. Well, thank you, Harry, appreciate everything. And and uh, let's go mess around some snakes together, pleasure and learn something. I'll get I'll get up to Montana sometimes. It's one of the few states I've never been in, so it's just just wonderful. Get up there. You're not too far away. Come see us, all right, Harry, I guess that's it. That's all thanks to Harry Green. H great interview man, one of my favorites. Uh, I think you know, unlike other recent interviews, I connected with Harry and a lot of things. I really appreciate his views on the outdoors. I really appreciate his experience with snakes and some of the things he taught me there. But just a good dude that I'd want to hang out with as much as possible. So if we can have them on again, there's there's a whole life's worth of experiences we have yet to down earth with Harry, so hopefully we can do that at some point soon. But thank you to him, thank you to his wife for letting me bor him for a while in color State University for let me get lost in their campus uh while I was there. And then also thanks to Cody Gardner for writing in with your not a sharp moment. Thanks to everyone that has been filling THHD at the Metator dot com with a bunch of stuff. Before we go, you should definitely continue to watch the Back forty. You go to the Mediator YouTube channel the Meteor dot com you can watch the Back forty with Mark Kenyon. Mark Kenyon we bought a property sixty four acres in Michigan and Mark Kenyon is working right now as we speak to try to kill a deer on it and also manage it for biodiversity. So it's a fun show. I've been working hard with Mark on it, so I appreciate if you guys went over there and watch that at the Mediator YouTube channel or the Metior dot com. I really would. And also another piece of content I work on every week that I really think is great is Remy warrants Cutting the Distance, Cutting the Distances, the podcast that will make you better pretty much any hunting tactic, mostly Western hunting tactics with Remy. Remy does a great job storytelling, he's a great job of giving tips and tactics, melding that altogether, and a beautiful gumbo of hunting advice. So go anywhere you can download podcasts or the meet dot com check out Cutting the Distance. Those are my two. If you want to know what I'm working on every week, it's THC and those two things. That's what it's spent most of my time doing. So um proud of those those contact projects, proud of the proud of Remy and Mark and all the hard work of everybody here to meet either team. So we're gonna see you next week in our next Whiskey and Ethics on Baiting. Soe then, because I ain't go a week without doing run, oh without run, drinking out and run a wrong drinking in Heaven, don't sit in at the bostould start the row root I'm feeling lagging. Hold on out barros shoes all down the one

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